Just to add some actual facts on this thread, If you want realtime raytracing in rasterisation situations (deferred rendering realtime) take a look at the GPU Pro 5 Article Object-order Ray Tracing for Fully Dynamic Scenes. Just to cheer people up, The source code is also situated at This Link . Ive already started looking at a UE4 Port and also a complete Opengl version for my own NexusGL engine. The code as is only supports Nvidia cards, Cuda radix stuff but if you look on the web their are Opencl alternative library’s that work very well (as ill be showing very soon )
Suggest people llok through the code, some great work in it.
what they do, makes sense only for simple product visualization…not for complex animation production. If you put couple of characters, sss,hair, environments with displacement, grass, DOF and motion blur (typical production features) this strange mix of technics will just fall apart. Moreover I can’t imagine lighters to use and learn 3 different renders.
It is better to tune Cycles with custom OSL shaders that can be as efficient as Open GL shaders. This will keep everything simple and uniform.
Quickness is not a futile question on profesional workflow, so having solutions for having, not the better, but a “good enougth” render is a very important question. see for example the success of aplications like KEYSHOT.
Is it possible to render hi res low samples first. Then low res and high samples second, take the passes from the low res and composite them with the colour pass of the first render? Hope this makes sense!